You Need to Write the Docs Yourself

This is a blog post about the need for documentation to be curated by humans.

So much of what I understand about the code I have produced, even when built without agentic AI assistance, comes at the point of documentation.

They say that we really understand things when we gain the ability to teach a subject, and documentation is a form of teaching.

Documentation is an opportunity to walk through your work from the users perspective and think again about how they will use what you have built. Is it as simple as it could be? What else might they try to do with it or want from it? What would you think of what you have built if you were the user?

Writing documentation is an opportunity to sit in the passenger seat, and is an opportunity missed when we let AI agents write the docs for the code we have written.

Agentic AI assisted docs can be useful in some situations however: